On 30 September / 1 October, Groningen hosted the Weekend of Science (named after Frits Zernike, Nobel Prize in physics, 1953). The event is for everyone, including families and children.
It was not easy to figure out a way to engage families and children in the research I am currently conducting about morphological productivity. Inspired by the experience at the Noorderzon festival, where I asked attendants to rate the acceptability of made-up words in Dutch (such as opbelbaar and groepfie) by handraising, I decided to run an acceptability rating experiment with the visitors at Zernike.
Attendands would listen on a pair of headphones to 15 sentences containing target words, six of which were made up by our team, such as kopelijk (buyable?), kunstelijk (artistic?), opbelbaar (available?), and bekoffiën (bring coffee?). Through the help of three (green, yellow and red) “bordjes”, children and adults were able to rate the words according to their judgement.
Tess, Sanne and I worked non-stop from 13h to 17h and collected the ratings of 44 people! Now, we are busy looking into the results… More soon!